Answering the Call of Juarez (A Series Retrospective)

welcome to the Ponderosa my friends for an evening of songs and stories about the American West a land of legend of romance a friendship and loyalty and courage a mother lode of remembrance a true bonanza [Music] the Call of Juarez games are part of that most neglected of action subgenres the video game Western / movies westerns were some of the very earliest action epics taking advantage of relatively easy to manufacture props and sets paired with the natural timelessly enduring splendor of the American landscape a great deal of self mythology in America is tied up in the West but increasingly pop culture has moved past or reinterpreted the western genre westerns don't have the artistic or cultural poll that they used to and that's been true for a while now video games are particularly sparse for straight up Western stories this was long before Red Dead Redemption rock star is sprawling epic in the style of a grand theft equine back then it was pretty much just a gun and Call of Juarez this was the game that led polish developer Techland to break out onto the video game development scene and create a name for themselves thanks in part to the fact that they poured a lot of passion into a sub-genre that most folks in most forms of media had already written off in a 2006 interview with GameSpot writer Harris Orkin singles out the decline of the Hollywood Western and the almost complete lack of in medium competition as a major driver for Qala foras from both a creative and business perspective saying quote Hollywood doesn't make very many westerns anymore so I saw this was a chance to help develop a game with the depth of a classic Western I'm sure Powell the developer who came up with the idea and basic characters was influenced by many of the same great westerns that influenced me khalaf Juarez brings to mind the themes and characters of Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven and pale rider Steve McQueen and Nevada Smith John Wayne's character Ethan Edwards and John Ford's The Searchers they're all stories about violence and vengeance and what it does to people's souls end quote it's this that's key to understanding both the successes and failures of this strange and delightful B series they begin with a foundation in the classic works of yesterday's western media while being consistently experimental and playful and trying to find how best to adapt that to an interactive mechanical method of storytelling kala Forres is a remarkable thing as a whole where each game is an evolution of the last even the universally reviled cartel installment they are equally fascinating as separate games for they're almost a defiantly experimental none of the games managed to be a masterpiece but each holds true to its own ambitions and its own creative priorities sometimes those priorities pan out often they don't really but the series particularly this first game is a real delight if only because you can actually sense the developer picking up classic themes images and flourishes from the old trail worn trunk of Western tropes and then turning them at odd angles searching for a way to make them fit together better in a way that makes sense for a player driven space the American West is both a mythological construct and an actual place and neither are easily translated to a medium where the storytelling is shared between author and audience and the landscape is limited by the hardware rendering it Call of Juarez the first is a game with a gimmick well a whole constellation of gimmicks actually but all of them stem from the big one that gimmick is that the narrative is divided between two characters the hunter and the hunted you begin as the latter the teenage Billy candle a plucky kind of well-meaning trickster character his levels are defined by stealth violent misunderstandings lasso centric platforming and a laughable fragility to enemy fire he's one classic Western archetype the kid gunslinger in over his head the game opens in a way that's refreshingly character driven for what was at the time a triple a shooter Billy's going back home to see his mother and confront his abusive stepfather his hometown hope Texas is full of [ __ ] and hypocrites who are even less happy to see him than he is to see them Billy comes in from a long way out of town traversing a long trail through the dry woods where the player completes some mandatory tutorials the tutorial for stealth is especially finicky and aggravating but it's also a taste of how stealth design is and levels to come shows the player that NPC routines are less important than obvious player routes pre-planned by the developer stealth and call of Juarez is linear a matter of trial and error more than it is a dynamic system sometimes there are large areas where a little variation is possible but time after time the way to get through it is to just Intuit what the level designer had in mind the mandatory tutorial here at the very beginning might be a disappointing chore but it leaves no illusions it doesn't suggest a robustness of systems that isn't there in levels to come as soon as you're done and hiking down into the back side of town Billy encounters the sheriff and has to surrender his pistol now this could have been an opportunity to create a wide-open scavenger hunt where the player gets to know hope and its inhabitants but instead you've just get a tiny sliver of that you amble down Main Street listen to a little bit of ambient dialogue and then get you who dat by one of the saloons working girls this preface is a tutorial where you use Billie's lasso to get up into a room undetected all of this is just to set up a stock simple conflict where the saloon owner doesn't take kindly to Billy get in a freebie so he sets the town's hired guns to kill him it's a ridiculous escalation but like the self tutorial it sets up reduced expectations for the narrative to follow the game will have many opportunities to go in deep character driven directions but it is likelier to get sidetracked by a hackneyed cliche and a [ __ ] joke that doesn't mean it's a bad game because of this creative blind spot but Call of Juarez is not as narrative ly playful with a thematic canon of Western stories the same way that it's mechanically playful when it comes to the game's tone and themes replication comes before interpretation most Western stories are about men become and men remain and men squint and toughly spittin impressively ridin confidently rootin tootin and shootin not necessarily in that order but often ly so while the Western has made a small comeback recently an independent filmmaking due in part to being more inclusive of women's voices and perspectives and movies like Meeks cut off or Netflix's recent godless series video games like Call of Juarez and gun took no risks with the source materials fascination with masculinity enter Reverend Raine his by all accounts a [ __ ] madman he is crazier than a [ __ ] rat and ten times as dangerous I enjoy the hell out of Reverend ray even if he is a vengeful psychopath and a real sumbitch just generally mostly on account of voice actor Mark Alaimo he voices raised lines with an accent that's less a drawl and more the rough yell of a mountain cat he sounds both feral and deranged and as the primary driver for the most dramatic and impressive violence in the game there couldn't be a better possible way for Mark to have played the role raised Billie's uncle Ray's brother Thomas is the abusive stepfather who beat Billy and Billy's mother Marissa growing up ray shares Thomas's reflexively low opinion of Billy and of Billy's Mexican heritage at the end of Billy's first couple levels he arrives back at his stepfathers farm there are screams and smoke perspective is now switched to Ray who is giving a fiery and near incoherent sermon to the Townsville COO he clearly detests a woman comes in and yells that there's trouble at Tallis's farm rayon writhing and finding Thomason Maresa dead immediately blames Billy so the chase begins but first ray has to remember the parts of himself acquainted with the chasing ray returns to the church and pulls the symbols of his old self out of a trunk he's got two pistols rusted an ancient and with neglect he's got the metal breastplate of a long dong conquistador repurposed as a bulletproof vest for Ray the sheriff tries to calm ray down but the town's criminal element sees this as an opportunity to kill the sheriff and frame ray so Reverend Ray begins his journey with the brief diversion of killing every last man with a gun in his hand which is the actual in-game objective and then burning down the saloon with the owner inside it and maybe the working girl's - who knows ray clearly doesn't care either way - ray hope is in need of cleansing and a judgment he is the tool of the Lord and today the Lord is a vengeful God religion looms large in the cultural formation of the American West and often there's a strange tension between European Christianity and the impossibly old and primal wilderness of the West before it was tamed and paved raise Christianity is notable because unlike many Western stories it's not seen as a redemptive characteristic or an indication of good intentions here it's pure delusion from start to finish towards the end of the game he says to Billy you must be innocent otherwise God would have let me kill you by now negating Billy and the players agency and chalking it up to divine intervention ray has a few moments where he wonders if perhaps God did not actually tell him to kill 50 men in a row if maybe all that murder was his idea and his responsibility but once the blood is spilled there is no pouring it back in the hole it must have been God because Ray's still standing telling is the conquistadores breastplate like those greedy zealots of old ray assumes that he doesn't need to question his actions at all ever if God is on his side if he takes what he wants and kills who he wants then it must be that God allowed it to be so and favors him specifically Marco lame-o's charisma saves ray from being wholly dislikable in this way but his voice acting work also further emphasizes that Ray's deep on crush conviction and his actions his personal manifest destiny is dangerously insane and terrifying to be on the receiving end of kala for as has real skill and knowing when to swap from Billy to ray when to let the player be powerful and when to make them weak the plot progresses in linear time meaning if you play a Billy level and then array one both those events will have transpired consecutively before you play Billy again sometimes you backtrack through a portion of a level you've gone through before but rarely and even then the mechanical difference between the two characters is massive the pacing feels fantastic as a result with varied highs and lows that develop out of different approaches to level encounter design that suit one character or another ray is easy to have fun with he's got a pistol in each hand and he can take being shot a few times before it really starts to impact him much weapons and khalaf Juarez have a limited number of uses depending on how well maintained they are a prime revolver of one sort another has better damage with better accuracy for longer whereas the rusty weapons most people carry and you can commonly pick up belts parkson's black smoke when they go off eventually misfiring and blowing out the hole firing mechanism when this happens ray rotates the gun a couple times to make sure his hand is all right and then disdainfully tosses the wreckage aside it's a wonderfully expressive animation and it's so OnPoint for Ray's approach outnumbered and outgunned is just a trifle an inconvenience for the old bastard the pistols are far from accurate and at longer ranges it feels like you're tossing bullets more than firing them but shooting left-right left-right and popping the hat off of one enemy while you put another couple slugs and other enemies yet it rhythmically evokes the feel of an Old West shootout even if mechanically it has a bit of an artificial awkwardness ray feels pretty unstoppable even if he does wither quickly when caught out in the open he's deliberately designed without athleticism level design for Ray is always straightforward directly ahead through the densest concentration of hostility no jumping around ray hasn't got time nor energy for anything but his judgemental Theory westerns are just one step removed from tall tales and superstition so the way Ray's toughness is constructed in the in the gameplay his supernatural deadliness isn't really that excessive for the genre it's understood that a gun-slinging story is going to be heavier on the story than it ever actually was with the gun slinging and that's where the value of Billy's levels really come into play Billy is forced to engage at long range and from hiding in order to make it through any combat at all he is preposterous ly fragile and is likely to kill himself falling down a cliff as he is from a stray bullet and that's a little closer to the truth of the experience than Ray's fireworks the functionality of the experience is still quite artificial in a little stiff and in its execution but it's important to note that Billy's chapters serve as a different mode of Western storytelling and not just mechanical pacing Calliphora is is not just the story of Billy being pursued by Ray it does its damnedest in its structure and gameplay to make you feel like a regular guy being pursued by an impossible legend from the past to illustrate let's look at Billy's best level the one where Billy hunts rabbits Billy gets washed into a river on a previous level and loses an amulet with which he was hoping to find the storied gold of Juarez a riff on the Treasure of the Sierra Madre right down to the curse that drives mad to those who seek it for their crime of greed he's saved by an Apache hermit named calm water calm water asks Billy to hunt him up three rabbits in the old way with a bow and arrow likely the player has already done plenty of bow hunting the game does a phenomenally Pleasant job of zooming in and slowing time as you pull back the string to let an arrow fly making one of the most useful weapons in the game and the only one which gives Billy a genuine tactical advantage but men are big and slow rabbits are tiny and fast you've really got to think about Piero to land it properly but that's not what's great about the level what's great is that it is 10 times larger than it has any reason to be and that does more to cement the sensation of being out in the American West than anything else in the game well the levels are large pathways up to this point have been linear even long journeys by horse are essentially down obvious environmental pathways following the road as its telegraphed to the player here you're given over a dozen locations where you can go rabbit hunting all our valid somewhere are three minutes of horse riding away or more you can get it over with quickly or you can just roam around hunting rabbits while the Sun shines down and the river gently gurgles its way through the valley towards a lake to the south with a strange rock formation calm water was in a place that suits his name after the hours of flight and pursuit it was an intermission for both player and character the afternoon lasts as long as you care to have at last the stakes are as low as you get come back with dinner or else don't when you're done with that you help put out a fire that's caught on calm waters tent you to palaver a bit and calm Otter suggestibility that if he keeps running he'll never be able to stop he challenges Billy to climb Eagles Mountain the strange formation to the south and retrieve a feather calm water will accept it as proof of Billy's intentions actually climbing eagle's Mountain is another thing altogether on the one hand I think it may be the most awkward and lengthy platforming sequence ever shoehorned into a big-budget shooter at least since half-life xen on the other it's so impressive in the scale of its clunkiness that it does have a charm to it the thing must have taken untold hours to make it takes around 20 minutes to switch back up to the top and another 5 to switch back down that complex root is embedded in the surface of this big blank rock face surrounded by a scenery of this huge land area that the level is designed with it's a true puzzle to work the route out and I couldn't often spot the parts where I must have Criss crossed myself the aesthetic of this game is kind of unique too and it's very apparent up here on the mountain Techland put a lot of effort into incorporating DirectX 10 features which enhance the scene in crepes in effect that land squarely between high and low definition there's a fuzziness to it that's matched by vivid colors and ambitious scale khalaf Juarez visually is hard to place it's a 2006 game and mostly looks like it except for these particular instances of specific DirectX 10 effects that immediately make a scene punch out of its weight division it looks old and new at the same time and feels it as well and controls and systems that are alternately elegant and awkward Billie's trek up eagle's mountain with the goofy lassoing an endless repetitive jump climbing is scenic and memorable equally as much as it is aggravating and silly all you have is the quick there are rattlesnakes and ordering birds to fight and gravity of course every shooter has things and people that want to kill you a Western game has to make sure that the land gets in a couple cracks as well it might be awkward about taking the time to develop a player's relationship with the landscape and the overhauling natural scale of the West adds an authenticity deeper than any hat or pistol could contribute the Eagle Mountain rabbit hunt is the game's least straight forwardly exciting level but it's also by far the most experimental and ambitious one in Call of Juarez even if that ambition doesn't amount to everything it hoped it would be in the execution calm water is the only native character in the game who doesn't immediately try and kill you though Western stories are told through an ethnocentric lens as often as they are a masculine one and two just as myopic a result I said it once before but I think it's worthwhile to step back and examine how weird it is that it's still so common to use the term Indian the term originated through a geographic misunderstanding it has no meaning whatsoever applied to the people that were actually here even though we have been culturally aware that Indian is a misnomer for over 400 years we continue to use the term because we Americans seem to collectively give that little of a [ __ ] about who the natives actually are and what makes their cultures and people's distinct from one another it's like if you lived around someone your entire life and even though you interact with them and people they know all the time you still don't know their name and have never bothered to remember you even cover for it by calling them a nickname that you made up for them and no one else uses on a personal level like that would not just be an outrageously dickish thing to do and yet that's what happens every time the term Indian is broadly used that way kala for as does the storytelling equivalent by putting in a cliche renegade Indian sequence the underlying mechanical encounter design is solid and you can see how they may have arrived at the point that they did with good intentions the level designers wanted a winding outdoor maze covering many miles a good enemy for that kind of maze would be one that relies on stealth and long-range combat as much as Billy does thematically speaking the easiest fit from the big box of Western cliches would be to put in a combat encounter with some native hunters and warriors mechanically it feels good to play and leverages the distances and erratic cover of the outdoor environment to create unusually tense combat compared to Ray but it's frustrating that kala Juarez does not try as hard to rise above the reflexive cliche as it tries to rise above the inherent contradictions of linear navigation in an outdoor environment it's even worse when you come through as Ray you're just mowing down these guys left and right with Ray's characteristic bible-thumping best when his deranged religious fixation has applied inward on Western cliches like the winningly dark kill every man in town with a gun in his hand objective from earlier it's campy it's fun when put in a situation with a little bit of historical resonance it feels tacky for decades natives from every territory and state in the West had to attend schools that would teach them Christianity and punish them for failing to assimilate to punish them for keeping to their traditions culturally much of what wasn't lost to violence was lost a moral certainty and moral condescension in this way so knowing down a whole tribe with cavalry pistols while quoting Bible verses is with a little context depressingly bleak and callously insensitive Calliphora is as great at finding resolution to the mechanical questions of how to frame a shooting game in the American West it is a little sloppier with resolving the ethical questions another problem that Call of Juarez runs into is that it never reconciled its length as a game with the length of its narrative there's enough in Call of Juarez for a solid 90-minute Western but this is in point of fact a 12 hour Western and things start to get pretty thin at that level of stretching and padding Ray's got some real clunkers of a level two especially one that takes place mostly in mine shafts that manages to both boringly retread ground gone over by the player in Billy's levels and also reduce the action to shooting men behind boxes in a grey quarter making it no better than the most generic of 90 shooters for the duration of the level put that together with the fact that one plot event occurs per level and you've got a real mid game slump where all you have is the cat-and-mouse between Billy and Ray and no real resolution in sight a little over halfway through Billy arrives at his girlfriend Molly's farm after stealthily Duc her father duck the ranch boss and all the farmhands to get to her it's actually a fine level it's relatable that Billy would want to explain himself to his sweetheart first and avoid the people who judge him without listening less relatable is being shot to death for deviating from the predetermined sneaking path at the animal level Molly's dad discovers Billy anyway just as ray bursts through the gates with a pack of armed men and the two stories begin to overlap an earnest those armed men lied to ray they said they were Texas Rangers but they're actually the folks who killed Thomas and are after Billy in the next level you shoot a lot of innocent people and Ray choose all those farmhands who had to avoid his Billy you put down screaming as ray when ray realizes this it gives him pause he doesn't give up on his religious fixation but he does admit that maybe God didn't want him to kill absolutely everyone Mali's kidnapped and now both Billy and ray turned themselves to the seemingly eternal videogame task of saving the damsel she's now in Mexico away and so is the gold that no one's really brought up in six hours so ray gives chase literal chase a horse versus stagecoach affair that actually physically portrays the journey from Texas Hill Country down into Mexico with the landscape slowly changing from forest to desert as the chase goes on and on and on and on it's kind of an indulgence it's boring from a gameplay perspective but fun from a thematic perspective most games especially linear ones will omit a long overland journey and just talk about it and cutscene Carlo Perez might stub its toe mechanically with a level like this but matically it really does deepen the feel of playing a western movie of participating in the genre as a player not nearly enough time is spent in the desert in coliform aching it to Juarez and by then the game has begun ramping up for its climactic escalations so what's the plot Billy tries to go home again but can't and his frame for murder by ray ray follows him Billy flees across Texas to find Molly Molly's kidnapped and Billy saves Molly with Ray's help after Reyes had you know just a minute to calm the [ __ ] down Billy and Molly live happily ever after the end it's enough story to squeak by on but it is squeaking pretty loudly video games are capable of showing more fantastical sights and making less realistic diversions than movies and sometimes it's hard to see that as a trend and not a rule what a game like fire watch which is equally interested in the western landscape comes along and refuses to indulge in its most fantastical as plot suggestions it's seen by a lot of players as a kind of abdication of narrative duty if you can do the ridiculous thing doesn't that mean you have to do the ridiculous thing this is how we wind up in an Aztec temple solving jumping puzzles to get to a pile of gold before we can move on to the obvious climax of Billy saving his girl gun also ends with a stack gold and so does the prequel all of Juarez we'll talk about in a minute it's like if you watched Once Upon a Time in the West and said to yourself you know it was okay but I wish it was more like national treasure - book of secrets there's a kind of restraint that defines a lot of westerns especially the Sergio Leone ones that set so much of the artistic agenda for what modern westerns are interested in doing it stands heavily at odds with the kind of loud and gleeful indulgences many games this kind of comic-book excess comes from the mediums own obsessions more than the Shinra it's trying to adapt although there is some fun lighting effects in the cave platforming in an anonymous underground area and hitting facade spotters with a whip is something that feels much more Nintendo than John Ford its gameplay that's unwilling to recognize how silly it appears next to the rest of the games earnest attempts at genre replication and adaptation calavaras has similar moments of dissonance in its special fighting modes brawling in quick draws whether Billy or Ray the mercifully brief moments where you're punching people out feel absolutely half-baked you do the same button combo over and over and a to long amount of time later you're some kind of Victor nothing feels lady or fluid it's just naked input/output until the task is done quick draws are all done with the targeting reticule reticule on the screen there's no break from the first-person perspective to emphasize the drama of the moment it's just a more formal less satisfying way to shoot someone in the game it's a moment of artificial structure at the exact moment that things should feel dramatically uncertain and dangerous kala for as has boss fight that makes you do both the modes the end of the game is actually mostly great a two-level assault on the compound of the bandit king who's Billy's real father and the person who ordered his mother and stepfather killed you go in guns blazing as Ray and then Ray gets stuck in a tight spot so you switch perspectives to Billy and come save the day by the end of the level though Billy is dual wielding fancy pistols and dropping fools as competently as Uncle Ray he's done running Billy beat Suarez the Bandit in a duel with his fists and then finally ray plants the fatal bullet in him as he sneaks up on Billy like from behind like some kind of b-movie monster then ray dies heroically his psychopathy apparently forgiving Billy and Molly appear beside his grave and the voice-over talks about how good it is that Billy finally became a man and stood his ground billy learned to be more like ray this is explicitly the cycle of violence and exploitation that defines the American West spooling into a new generation yet it's presented as personal growth Billy refuses to reflect that without raised arranged to pursue to that evaporative moment of heroism wouldn't have even been necessary the whole convoluted chain of cause and event is ignored in favor of focusing on an outcome that is favorable to the victor for good or ill that's a pretty widespread way to talk about the American West in terms of real tangible history the story of the American West is one of greedy cruel men taking whatever they wanted and calling themselves pioneers and heroes for doing so the next game in the series bound and blood explores this dynamic in greater detail both deliberately and accidentally it features ray Thomas and their younger brother William it tells how it was that Thomas and Risa came to be Billy's parents how Billy got that funny amulet how ray put down his pistols and took up the Bible in the first place yet it also has a funny amnesia about Thomas's domestic abuser and Ray's raving lunatic bounden blood never makes Thomas and Ray out to be more than the amoral anti-heroes of a revisionist Western like the Wild Bunch or High Plains Drifter but it spends little time compared to those movies exploring the built-in nihilism of the Western antihero archetype instead skimming off the surface of their selfishness in misanthropy to give the player a platform for solid first-person in gunplay Mountain blood is a better game than the previous on every benchmark of organizational structure and technical presentation it's better at conveying itself and its themes than the original game but it's got a fatal flaw in the narrative it builds predictably along a narrative arc where you get to like the characters and sympathize with their struggles and even though they make some capital letter bad decisions the ending is still a happy one with Thomas and Maresa married by Ray who has given up his gun belt in favor of little brother Williams Bible isn't that just cozy and sweet here's the thing you can make a serviceable Western from pastiche by cobbling together bits and pieces of better stories that have come before bound and Bloods story is never better than serviceable and it relies heavily on this kind of composite cliche but a memorable and meaningful Western on novel Western is one that has an independent identity and a consistent tone info focus let's illustrate this using exclusively Clint Eastwood movies his most famous early work is the good the bad and the ugly aspra lling spaghetti western those movies are so named because they were filmed in Italy by Italians which is why when you're watching them sometimes lips and voices don't actually match up you're watching a dub the original was never in English in the first place Tech Lands Call of Juarez games are all polish productions following in that tradition of European exploration of American mythology Sergio Leone's Italian westerns were iconic partly because of that cultural remove American westerns of the 40s and 50s tended to be morally simplistic black black hat white hat Affairs like the Hopalong Cassidy franchise where ha blonde appears in something like over five dozen movies far more than any modern expanded universe movie franchise Hollywood wanted to emphasize the romanticism of the West the self-perception of American frontier culture is inherently good and a civilizing force Leone's movies especially the man with no name films like Fistful of Dollars and for a few dollars more were a lot more skeptical of frontier morality Eastwood's man with no name is more of a Greek hero than an American one relying as he does on cleverness much more than goodness he's a mercenary and while he is the good in that movie it's understood that it's all pretty relative and the good the bad and the ugly are at least all a little cruel deep down after all what romantic vision of the West would have its hero sit on the side of a half dug grave and tell the other main character you see in this world there's two kinds of people my friend those with loaded guns and those who dig you dig the spaghetti-western deliberately ignored the kind of self aggrandizing morality plays that hollywood spat out over and over again and the immediate aftermath of world war ii the sub sub-genre of spaghetti westerns told stories of crusty greedy men doing bad deeds and weather-beaten poverty-stricken nowhere villes it told stories where the hero and the villain are told apart primarily by whether they actively enjoy murder or if they're just talented at it this is the kind of story bound in blood wants to tell but it never screws up the confidence to really tell it so let's talk about High Plains Drifter Eastwood made this movie himself a while after winding now in his collaboration with Sergio Leone and in it he continues to play a nameless stranger with a fast hand in a threadbare serape but High Plains Drifter goes way way farther in its cynicism than Leone ever dared it is for my money of the most absolutely nihilistic Western ever made every character protagonists and antagonists both are driven only by spite and self-interest Eastwood's main character rapes a woman within minutes of the movie opening for the crime of knocking a cigar out of his mouth and then again rapes another woman simply despite her husband and because everyone is too afraid of him to object he's hired to save the town but he deliberately lets them all die and lets the town burn because he hates them so much the town's folk are only threatened in the first place because they killed their own Sheriff and got in over their heads with an outlaw gang in High Plains Drifter everyone is a criminal everyone is complicit in each other's degradation the movie was filmed at scenic and serene Mono Lake but when Eastwood's nameless gunslinger orders the town painted red and the signpost changed to hell hell is what it is there is no redemption there is no point there is only greed and violence that compounds in on itself until finally erupting in fire and blood Sergio Leone's man with no name stories ultimately come down on the side of Eastwood's character that for all his trickery and violence he's still an admirable and worthy person for flourishing in such a bleak and hostile world High Plains Drifter takes the character to a more honest conclusion a bleak and hostile world shapes a bleak and hostile people and he can't wear a gun on your hip and choose who lives and who dies without falling into complicity with a whole cycle of exploitation and misery the man with no name in High Plains Drifter is a villain who the town's Volk only realized too late is worse than the simple death they had come into them to begin with ray and Thomas are characters in this vein they're slaveholders who begin the game by deserting their unit in the Confederate Army to go home and save their plantation from the Yankees the game is infuriatingly cagey about it with characters referring to it as of the family farm it's never directly stated that the McCall's owned the slaves but their neighbor did and their family farm is large in wealthier by far than the explicitly slaveholding neighbor the McCall family ray Thomas young William we're people who from birth profited on the suffering of others they kept people as property they fought in war to protect their right to keep those people as property the second level of the game has you liberating the McCall plantation from Union soldiers who have seized it ray swears on his life that he will return one day and rebuilt what was lost when another character Barnsby declares that the South shall rise again and the Confederacy will return it's it's presented as a villain speech Barnsby talks about putting the old order of things back together where blacks and natives and northerners all knew their place and the consequences for overstepping it and this is framed as Barton's be being a mustache twirling bad guy but how is it actually materially different from Ray's pledged to rebuild the plantation an idea that both Thomas and william wax nostalgic ly about even as the game goes on to its conclusion these are men who grew up taking who grew up exploiting and when they suffered a setback and were no longer the masters they once were well they simply went west into a lawless vacuum and continued to take anything they wanted do anything they pleased and plant a bullet and anyone who had a strong objection to it ray and Barnsby are not so different trying to pretend that they are dulls whatever edge in antihero creates in the first place declan's position is a polish developer riffing on American mythology in history is a lot of what gives the game its unique feel and identity but also a lot of what holds it back not only does tech land have a wealth of material to reference they also have the cultural distance to make a slightly more cynical and condemnatory narrative route than an American studio might choose and yet over reliance on the source material and face value acceptance of some of the old myths of manifest destiny end up contributing to a final product that's ultimately unwilling to draw any conclusions from the questions that it asks about its characters in terms of the Confederate angle it's clear that the inspiration and guiding tone comes from another Clint Eastwood classic The Outlaw Josey Wales Wales is a Missouri farmer whose family is killed by Union soldiers so he joins the Confederates for a revenge after the war is over Union troops execute all the confederates he fought with and they put a bounty on his head when he escapes that fate Jozy flees west the difference between josie and rey is that by the end of the movie josie actually does find redemption helping a group of oddballs and outcasts like him find some peace and world that judges them reflexively his involvement with the confederacy is something that he pays for something that he works to make up for through kindness later on at the end of the man hunting Josie lets him free by pretending not to recognize him he says I think I'd try to tell him that the war is over and then he asked Josie what he thinks of that Josie says I reckon so yes we all died a little in that damn war the movie ends with time is the victor instead of any of the characters it ends because that man the infamous outlaw whales is gone time and conscience erased him all the same as a bullet might have maybe more thoroughly in khaliv or as we know for an absolute fact that neither Thomas nor Rey learned anything their arcs are not redemptive in the slightest we learned that Thomas loves the Mexican bandit Moll Maresa and the game plays their romance off is something relatively straightforward and positive but maurices role is a tragic one she talks about how all her life men just used her her stepfather one Mendoza the man who will one day have her killed ray only Thomas truly loves her according to the game but she's wrong about that too at least for now Billie's remembrances of Thomas in the first game paint him as a resentful man who beats his wife and his son because he hasn't got power over anything else after the events of bound in blood Thomas will grow smaller and smaller inside himself on his remote Texas farm he will never stop being the man who feels entitled to whatever he wants although later in life he will find it harder and harder to succeed in the taking Ray learns little of true peace and forgiveness his opening sermon in the first game is full of bubbling rage and hatred of the town's folk that make up his congregation the only explanation for this disconnect is the business truth that with video games sequels usually do better and sell to a wider audience than the original game and games are not as beholden to their predecessors as movies when it comes to structure tone and narrative consistency bounden blood sought to pull a whole new audience and audience who doesn't have to know that there isn't a happily ever after waiting for these characters the game is more triumphant and easier to like if you ignore these things but that tidy triumphalism comes at the expense of narrative honesty and depth which is of course also a common trope of American Western mythology the dial-up romanticism compared to the first game does go hand in glove with another of tech lands design priorities for the game though namely the goal of making the landscape grander and more impressive and what they've done is still eight years after its 2009 release especially evocative of western vistas there's a kind of theatrical exaggeration to it that he wouldn't find in movies which tend to use real places even when they ignore real history instead the mountains of the skybox tower over the valleys of the play areas and almost all the landscapes have that feeling of fantastic excess that video game environments so often have tech lends environments are closer to Tamriel than Texas but the intent is to highlight the mythic nature of the story being told and the sense of towering colossal scale there's a lot to cement that there's a level set in a rural Arizona town with mountains that tower higher and sharper than any mountains you would actually find in Arizona but I once visited an old nineteenth-century mining town called Jerome which is built at insanely steep angles into the mountainside it's maybe a thousand feet to the valley below and not 3,000 but the effect is still one of towering peaks and wrong shadowed vistas stretching beyond I couldn't get Jerome off my mind when playing the game and the two went arm in arm aesthetically a movie being passive media invites a close look at the landscape a game active media which won't stop shooting at you does not so these larger-than-life sky boxes may not have a lot of fidelity to the land but they are quite faithful to the aesthetic and the vibe and are designed to evoke that sensation at just a casual glance instead of a long panning shot there's no level as calm or as nature focused as the last games Eagle Mountain rabbit hunt but bounden Bloods much more ambitious than its predecessors in portraying a variety of environments from shivering desert to Airy peaks of exposed rock and evergreen trees like something out of an Ansel Adams photograph like the narrative the environmentalist etic is a highlight reel pastiche of Western iconography it works incredibly well though this time and it keeps the players engagement even when the story hits some serious lolz strangely bounden blood contains breaks in the story at where the player can explore an open world map with three side quests apiece to do each time it occurs one map is in the deserts of Mexico one in the arid mountains of Arizona in rating reviews from around the time of release I've seen the word unfinished used in relation to these levels a lot they are exactly they're just deliberate player driven interludes wherein the players scale in relation to the land is emphasized there are things that do give it an unfinished feel like random encounters with bandits attacking homesteaders that aren't marked or meaningful over you resolved when you run across them the beleaguered peasants of the Juarez area map speak in the same southern drawl as the Arizona homesteaders of the later map but like Billy's rabbit hunt the point is less what you do then how much space you have to do it in the American West is truly overwhelming in its natural scale I drove through it for 10 months and barely skipped off the surface the scale is important because one of the reasons why violence is so impactful in the American West is that all this sudden loss an explosive injury takes place in a vacuum of wilderness you might go days without seeing anyone and then the one person you do see wants to kill you and take your [ __ ] or maybe not but either way the myths are inseparable from the land legends grow to the size of mountains the mountains do not condescend to shrink to the scale of men's petty grievances the lushest environments inbound and blood revolve around the cheesiest conflicts unfortunately this Call of Juarez game goes a long way towards humanizing its native characters compared to the last one but still never transcends the most basic cliches of writing made of characters here the game central conflict is driven by the destruction of the Apache the frontier is beginning to tighten like a noose around the tribes the West so chief running river sends his half white son seeing farther to go by them rifles Juan Mendoza also known as the bandit Juarez will sell them hundreds of rifles for a medallion that will reveal the location of a great Aztec treasure of course the rifles are breasted and busted and won't work the whole thing is a scam on the one hand the plot does deliberately highlight the position of the Apache during manifest destiny they're being driven from their homes and the only way to fight is to buy weapons from the whites to war with the whites in their own way Puma paw character at the meeting from which this all unfolds sarcastically asks if running river plans to ask the whites to shoot themselves as well it was gonna sell the tribe his fortune to gamble on the rifle deal there's no good option for the Apache they can be meek and be bullied or they can fight and bring on the inevitable even faster either path will reach the same destination the end of the Apache the game squares the circle but of trying to include a native perspective in the narrative and still use them as a common enemy taya by playing up the conflict between the Apache and the Comanche if we're humanizing the Apache then you get to gun down as many Comanche as you please because they're ornery and likely to shoot first in a certain way this is better than just having mad Indians for an antagonist because it acknowledges the multiplicity and distinct identities of native cultures the Comanche even get a small moment of humanization of their own however fleeting the medallion that seeing farther needs to pay for the rifles is buried on a Comanche burial mound under a reservoir Thomas and Rhea blow up the dam drain the lake and reached the sacred mound the Comanche don't want to shed blood on it and so cease their attacks while surrounding Thomas and Rhea willing them to relent their attack and leave this sacred place you can see where this is going though right Thomas and Rhea see this is an opportunity and kill as many Comanche as they possibly can while the Comanche you're all just standing there singing farther judges them harshly and never really forgives them but they don't need forgiveness they get the amulet anyway there are no consequences for Thomas and Rhea who see native beliefs as nothing more than superstition to be leveraged for a cheap tactical advantage and they win they get everything they want and walk into the sunset it's easy to say they are bad men for doing so that much is obvious harder to admit is that this is more or less the American position on Native relations in microcosm when tribal land is found to contain something valuable European Americans have always felt entitled to it we want it we can take it so we do voices may raise objections but a voice is carried away by the wind and lost while the act of exploitation itself endures a big problem is that the only moral counterweight to Thomas and Rhea is their little brother William and William is just a completely insufferable little [ __ ] he's been studying to be a priest and wears a preacher's collar he abhors his violence and becomes fast friends with seeing farther he reveals to the Apache the fact that Juarez is going to sell them useless weapons he laments the many cruelties done by his fellow McCall's but he does so with a cloying self-righteousness that completely ignores how he benefits from their wrongdoing William is the biggest champion of returning East and rebuilding the plantation he's not the sort that Minds owning people supposing you can preach at them Thomas and Ray are no question terrible people and there's a value in providing a moral contrast to them but William is so young naive and self-righteous but it's easy to write off his criticism of Ray and Thomas as frivolous whining his version of Christianity is a list of rules that can god-willing save men from themselves it assumes that everyone is a sinner and that moral life is built around self-denial this is what makes him such an ineffectual foil for Thomas and Ray if you ask someone what's better being yourself and doing as you like or assuming that you're bad and living in permanent fear of being yourself in a meaningfully complete way I mean who would ever choose the latter by portraying kindness is a fundamentally naive notion by making it so the only objections than call family crimes are delivered as frivolous lectures from a spoiled child it forgives ray and Thomas too much for too many things they are by stark contrast to William actually having fun so is the player and the three of us bond over that more than a movie would allow especially like I mentioned with Mark Alaimo voice work for Ray which is even more likeable here than in the last game I hate what the McCall brothers represent the unchecked and on critical devotion to self interest in personal whim but I am more actively annoyed by William as a character even if our morals agree better Williams a guy who can never and will never just chill the [ __ ] out in half a beer Thomas and Ray are although it's understood that they would never just stop at one beer there is a middle ground where a person can object to violently selfishness and petty cruelty and still revel in the messiness of day-to-day life that middle ground never appears here for better or worse ray and Thomas hew closer to the American frontier values than William ever does the Western is a genre where individuality is the ultimate ideal we're pitting the self against nature and against other humans and coming out the victor is the only conflict that means anything consider high-noon one of the great artistically serious early westerns in it Marshall well Kane has just hours to decide what to do about the return of a criminal he put in jail years ago and the absolute certainty of a violent confrontation if he chooses not to run his wife is a religious pacifist in Williams vain and chooses to leave her husband and leave town if he insists on standing his ground Marshall Kane asks everyone in town for help and they all refused he stands in total isolation in the middle of the street to face his would-be executioner this is what a true hero looks like in a Western he stands alone but he stands tall and his shadow is long High Noon is a straight Western not a cynical revisionist one and it genuinely believes in its protagonists heroism but that heroism is still based in radical self determination the reification of the self his wife is called coward for leaving him and at the last minute she decides her husband is more important to her than her quicker ISM and she ends up killing one of the villains posse herself together wordlessly the couple leave their ungrateful town behind once the smoke clears Williams abstract moralizing means nothing and world of dirt and blood in a Western the correct foil for cruel and villainous expressions of individuality is a display of courageous and selfless individuality to match it good and evil circling each other over and over again forever a hand slowly moving toward the gun belt and a foot slowly inching toward the fatal moment where the two can no longer coexist and a shot rings out bound and blood builds towards a clunky misfire of a climax which is something prequels are usually able to avoid so here's how it goes Maresa the bandit mall has been flirting with both the older McCall's her sexuality is pretty explicitly her only defining characteristic and her only defense against men like Mendoza and Rae Thomason Rae often fight over women on account of Thomas being a good-looking guy and Rae being well more of a man shaped bolder yet Rae still feels entitled to the kind of womanizing Thomas indulges in he doesn't care if Marissa is lying to him about wanting and he wants her and if there's anything about Rae that's concrete it's that he cares a great deal about making sure his wants are fulfilled Marisa convinces Thomas to leave Rae and William Hinde in Mendoza's fort and go after the gold themselves when ray and william catch up ray decides to kill thomas and take the gold in the woman bulk william stands between them and pretends to go for his pistol against ray so ray unthinkingly draws first and guns his younger brother down william bleeds out onto the pile of gold this is what prompts ray to take up religion and give up on violence up until the events of the first game anyway then Barnsby appears and captures Maresa and ray finds himself with a little more violence in him after all the Aztec Chamber dramatically fills with sand and buries a gold a kind of peculiar choice seeing as the gold is just sitting there in the main game bound and blood feels beholden to the first game enough to recreate the level architecture of Mendoza's fort from the first game entirely but not enough to give up on a high energy action movie moment like this the moral everyone of the epilogue derives from this is that family is important and if Ray wasn't so blinded by anger and greed he wouldn't have shattered his own and that's it Thomas and Marissa are married ray cleans himself up all as well all is forgiven for now it's strange and how uncritical and uncomplicated and bombastic it is considering that the game is otherwise anchored in moral ambiguity and the ending could have the same events and be much more appropriately bleak by just embracing the ante part of its anti-heroes ray shooting William is seen as somehow an escalation of the person who he's been that his jealousy over Thomas getting the glittering prizes both mineral and human drove him to a moment of mad excess well excuse me but who in the audience is actually surprised by this this is who Ray has always been the surprising thing is that Ray even gives a [ __ ] now if this was some other boy and not William rate would have gunned him down over grilled cheese sandwich Marissa choosing to be with Thomas damns her to exactly the life she said she didn't want a life of being just an accessory to men whose appetites are bottomless and the gold is lost in a way that seems close to permanent you put all that together and you get an ending that ought to be nihilistic or at least straightforward enough to say bad people sometimes get away with bad things and have that be the tone of the climax this is an instance where videogame westerns have to be a little bolder than their cinematic counterparts because to condemn the protagonists is to also condemn the player in a surface way if the ending really leaned into being bleak if it really did tell the player that all their activity has been purposeless cruelty it would run counter to the traditional satisfactions of beating the game a games end is often a celebration of the player both their skill and making it to the end and their patience in completing the journey bound in blood is considered by most players to be the best Call of Juarez game and I wonder if that opinion would still hold true if the climax was less congratulatory and triumphant what people think it was a worse game for it because a little more narrative cynicism would certainly have made it a better Western the next game in the series is one that Tek plans very own CEO once called a mistake in a 2015 Eurogamer interview kala for as the cartel is a spectacular failure as a game as a story as creative endeavor but it didn't arrive there in a vacuum the cartel is intended to be a modern Wild West shooter delivering that same old feeling of frontier lawlessness and moral ambivalence that drove bound in blood but against the civilized backdrop of Los Angeles the remarkable thing here is that the cartel is such an unbelievably terrible game because it actually succeeds in some of those ambitions not because it fails in them now there are a lot of technical flaws that make it a bad game as well it doesn't look half as good as bound in blood and plays twice as worse despite being 2 years newer and running off DirectX 11 but at its core if you ask what are modern American myths about border culture the answer would be just about as aggressively stupid and mean and petty is this [ __ ] game the cartel is barely even able to articulate any answer to that question because the entire thing is a shambling chimera of cable television cliches and Juvenal edge if it took Criminal Minds the shield and the Punisher put them in a pot bowled away everything that people find redeeming about them you'd be left with a solitary bone of structure and a thick viscous or render of gross dialogue the cartel is embarrassing to play because it actually straightforwardly represents the most unflattering ignorant cliches about video game design as a medium it's like actually playing one of the games on Law & Order SVU that kind where Tutuola has to explain that one's kala Juarez the game where you steal drug money beat up hookers for information and if I saw it on television I think come on it's not really like that with videogames but in this particular instance it absolutely is and speaking critically about the last game I said I would prefer a bit more nihilism and a stronger embrace of its characters as being awful people who do selfish things well I got my wish and now I have to smoke a whole carton of nihilism at its root the cartel shares many storytelling values with bound and blood it sees the defining characteristic of the frontier spirit as greed it sees the gunslinger as a character who takes what they want and are defined more by the taking than anything constructive it sees the violence of the West is necessarily cyclical and intergenerational that a border town then sees the same violence for the same reasons as a border town now and it sees the American West is a place where the winners tell the stories and a bad deed rarely spawns a meaningful consequence but the West is no longer wild it is no longer a vacuum of wilderness that will swallow up the screams of the dying civilization holds people accountable communities hold each other accountable and a world where police brutality captured on cell phone cameras triggers a national movement of protest this game gives you an achievement for killing 40 black gangsters in a Los Angeles slum and have I mentioned you're supposed to be some kind of police officer it goes well beyond tacky headlong towards actual bigotry the thing that allows the Western to stay enduringly powerful is that despite the sexism and ethnocentrism so widespread in the genre storytelling there is an understanding of it all is allegorical and mythic it's focused on individual expression and integrity of character as the highest good can have a broader appeal than the initial dimensions of the works perspective the appeal is that in our current state of extreme civilization we can go back and imagine a time where the individual can stand alone against the frontier accountable to no one but themselves Americans often use the Western to tell ourselves stories that we want to hear about ourselves what our essential character is after being tempered in the fires of conflict and survival nearly everything the cartel has to say about the American character is equal parts insulting and preposterous it may be tempting to use the word parody in relation to the cartel because it is almost hypnotically cartoonish for all its attempts at darkness and sleaze but there's one particular moment that stood out for me as having been tasteless in 2011 that's aged spectacularly poorly by the time 2018 has almost arrived you're at a club with music and dancing and such and get into a firefight with the drug dealers running the place you do a door breach which works exactly the same as it does in bone blood or the more famous Call of Duty series on the other side are three gunmen in front of dozens and dozens and dozens of innocent partygoers there is no in-game consequence for killing civilians besides an achievement and there's an achievement there because it's hard to go the whole game without you or more likely your partner's killing people they aren't supposed to so you as the player can aim your shots or without penalty you can just open fire and not care I haven't felt this deep down uncomfortable with a game in recent memory last year's shooting at the pulse nightclub and this year's attack on the concert in Las Vegas impacted me more than I realized I remember reading the story as Mandalay Bay shooting survivors especially that confusion the pain the small moments of selfless heroism and I can't really ever go back to a place inside myself for a mass shooting as entertainment now obviously you aren't supposed to kill everyone but if you do it's no problem this is the fundamental issue with the cartel that prevents it from even functioning as a modern Western even in the nihilistic throws of High Plains Drifter there was never a point in time where the violence was absolutely devoid of meaning even the Wild Bunch the killing of innocents made a thematic point contributed to our understanding of these men as monstrously callous in the cartel nothing is taken seriously enough to feel like it has wait even though serious themes are all it's really interested in trying to talk about this is how we can arrive at a scene where the main character potentially kills dozens of unsuspecting people who have not done anything wrong and this scene is entirely immaterial to the plot it's just a quick moment on the level it's never discussed at all even when it happens this is just between game and player are you a precise enough shot to refrain from outright mass murder if you're not it's okay we don't even have to discuss it the cartel does not understand any of its characters as people they're just vague ideas and 3d models the only way is seen like the nightclub shooting can skate by is by ceasing to understand the characters as human by just reducing everything to digital marionettes on a stage call of duty modern warfare 2 also had a mass shooting scene and manded it also caused some dissonance but at least there it's made clear that this is all a horrible thing and what you're doing is deeply monstrous the US and Russia literally have a war because of the shooting in that game's plot back here in Call of Juarez what you're doing is not portrayed as monstrous it's portrayed as frivolous it means nothing to make something so flat and meaningless from something so disturbing and horrible to make something so carelessly abstract out of a painfully concrete reality takes nothing less than the writers completely turning their backs on the idea that the player would ever become invested in the world of the game in the first place I wonder how much of this comes from the developer is being polish and viewing American culture from a distance fictional cable news bits often play during the loading screens and they feel kind of surreal and how almost prophetic they were about the coming build the wall era if most of what you see of America is cable news is this really what it looks like a dystopian hellscape of genocide aliy criminal border cops and gangs that run around stealing American women to sell into sexual slavery that is an actual subplot by the way trying to describe any of the events of the plot feels like reading a fox news headline out loud which is entirely deliberate like u.s. task force kills hundreds of smugglers is war with Mexico next or maybe DEA denies reports of gunfire burning marijuana fields in Sequoia National Park there is not a single solitary character in this game who's in corrupt or crooked let's break it down the overall plot is that there's a task force put together by the DEA to and I'm not kidding here ignore every law they want to try and destroy the Mexican drug cartels this three-person squad consists of Eddie a DEA agent who gets a small bonus with close range weapons like shotguns and shove machine guns an FBI agent named Kimberly who does the long-range thing and LAPD homicide detective Ben McCall who is basically the hey remember ray everybody liked Ray character who inexplicably wears a cowboy hat and does the two-fisted revolver thing despite this being Los Angeles not [ __ ] Texas the campaign is meant to be played in a cooperative mode with three players as each character but the idea is that it's uncooperative co-op each mission has a secret agenda that that you only get the bonus for if none of your partners see you collect these items each of the characters hates the other two and each has a double life that gets slowly revealed through awkward phone calls during cutscenes and levels Eddy is being blackmailed and needs money which he pockets from folks who kill Kim as a snitch who's looking for dirt on everyone to use against them and then has a thing for prostitutes and are they are continually calling him and asking him to steal stuff for them that's in addition to the crimes that all these characters commit during gameplay and cutscenes all of this goes on and on interminably until it's revealed that Dixon the woman who put the unit together is working for one cartel and using her DEA position to put the heat on all the cartels competitors this is supposed to be a twist but there's not a single minute of the game that isn't about being perpetually disappointed in and paranoid of other people a real surprise twist would be if someone said the words I'm sorry at any point in time it's at this point that the multiple character gimmick and collar Juarez becomes completely played out and pointless in the first game it made sense and it was done with confidence million ray didn't just have opposite contrasting play styles they also had level design unique to their strengths and challenges bowden blood replaces Billy with Thomas but since the game has no stealth the difference is not really too great between brothers ray and Thomas ray was a powerhouse and a much more mechanically distinct character with his dual wielded pistols and dynamite playing as Thomas was just like playing a regular shooter plus a lasso the level design and bound in blood didn't much change at all except for minor routing differences Thomas was boring but not half as boring as any of these characters mechanically thematically they all amount to the same thing uncooperative co-op is an interesting idea but that's all it is without more thought going into it it's a hard sell to get to friends and say to them let's all play a mediocre shooter where we get to be mean [ __ ] for eight hours together let me give you an example of how this all tangibly comes together I'm at a level where an arms dealer is sending me to test his weapons on prisoners that he's released into a ghost town this in town in fact from bound and blood where Thomas and Ray inadvertently rescued Barnsby from the Pinkertons I'm chasing some guy for some reason I don't care much about so Ben the character I'm playing takes a phone call in the middle of this chase which slows down his run to a walk I'm going over rickety boards on the edge of a canyon and this [ __ ] is having a leisurely chat about stealing an antique pistol for someone else the woman on the line is hooking with earlier in the game Ben stole money because another sex worker called him to say her baby has hepatitis C and she needs cash bad this is the kind of stuff the game thinks is gritty dialogue that always ends up being ludicrously self-indulgent League roasts and it throws these moments at you without caring if maybe you're in the middle of something else in the actual gameplay which is not to say the game doesn't make ass part of being gross anyway but the shooting itself is so simple and basic that it's the least offensive thing about the game movement speed is frustratingly slow and thick like your characters covered head-to-toe in molasses enemy is mostly remember to shoot at you but occasionally forget mechanically the cartel is bland and entirely without character which kicks the focus back up to the game's tone and narrative which are much more aggressively terrible I'm really curious actually how the shooting ended up being so toothless considering that bound and blood gave its western air Arsenal a real kick and wait that movement and navigation there felt perfectly fluid both Thomas and Ray had a special bullet time mode where you could make kills automatically Thomas did it by fanning a single revolver ray David by marking 12 shots for his double revolvers and then rapid firing all those trick shots when the timer runs out here there's just a half-assed five-second slow motion during which Ben will make some kind of Bible ish one-liner again deliberately referencing ray without bothering to actually carry over anything that was mechanically or personally interesting about him he's only got two of these lines as well so I think I might have grit my teeth through him saying I did not come to bring peace but a [ __ ] short somewhere upwards of 40 times there are other peculiarities of cheapness like the same corner market appearing a dozen times in a single level as a reused texture and then popping up in later levels - or a photo of a board looking blonde teenager who appears in the same photograph on billboards on walls and in picture frames so if the cartel is a frivolous pile of cheap and gross [ __ ] how is it a Western let's look at the two primary subjects of the cartels cruelty in spite starting with women back when I brought up Eastwood's character and High Plains Drifter being twice a rapist during the course of the movie I brought it up mainly to show that in a cynical deconstruction of the gunslinger archetype even Clint Eastwood himself as an artist and a director felt that an element of violent misogyny was part of the character westerns are so focused on men versus men that women are often left out of the story entirely but when they are included it's typically only as a way of being accessory to the male character HBO's Westworld reboot was incredibly explicit in acknowledging and addressing this deeply rooted trope the show said loudly and straightforwardly that the Western fantasy was one of exploitation and power and that men feeling entitled to women was just about the very first thing guests demonstrate getting off the train you don't even have to finish getting your costume on tact exploitative Lee towards the robot host and once you're in the park well yet Westworld is a particularly worthwhile lens through which to view the Call of Juarez series because that show is in critique of both video games and westerns and seeks to show how pairing a consequence-free environment with a self aggrandizing power fantasy very quickly leads to murder and rape these things are also present in the 1973 original of Westworld the robot massacre is prefaced by one of the Robo maidens of medieval world rebuffing a guest sexual advances here in the cartel Ben McCall strangles not one not two but three sex workers while trying to get information he could have used his grown-up words to ask for you could say oh this part is the antihero a bit but the game doesn't set it up like something Ben would ever be judged on by the player or by I don't know a court of law perhaps he has power over these women so he threatens and Barretts them and then does favors for other sex workers with the understanding that they'll pay him back in trade at one point all three cops toss a sex worker back and forth slapping and hitting and talking down to her like a childhood bully's game of keep-away taken even farther this kind of thing is so tasteless and foul that it wouldn't even make it on of the awful television that the cartel derives inspiration from even the shield would try a little harder than this not to be so actively callous and shitty it's not even the only time that the three characters have a cooperative beat of someone they made a man almost to death on the side of the freeway with the apparently accurate expectation that no one will stop no one will notice and no one will care later on they hang a suspect by his neck as part of a larger series of actual tortures they're putting a guy through and then deliberately failed to render aid to an informant later on and let him get shot explicitly because they don't really care if he lives or dies and aren't willing to make an effort to tip the scales either way in aggregate this is absurd but if you take any individual cruelty it's one that has a small basis in reality the 1992 LA riots happened because four police officers were caught on tape and guess what beating a suspect within inches of his life on the side of the freeway the officers were acquitted in the rage over that acquittal consumed the city four days today similar instances of police brutality are causing similar levels of outrage and anger people are fighting for a better tomorrow where this kind of thing doesn't happen so much anymore the cartel is by contrast saying that we will never be better than the boot print on the face of an innocent man it's that apathy and acceptance toward these cycles of violence that's the most truly infuriating thing about the game's plot in his uncharacteristically savage critique of the game Dan port no of extra credits notes that the game subplot about Mexico stealing American women is particularly noxious considering that there's a substantial real-life problem with women being trafficked the other direction mostly the rural poor of Mexico being coerced into commodifying themselves at the behest of the real cartels and then brought into the United States if the game wanted to talk about real life if it gave some sort of small and solitary [ __ ] about that kind of thing it absolutely could have but it's mired in that other destructive Western media trope reflexive ethnocentrism ever since the [ __ ] Alamo Mexico and Mexicans have been the go-to antagonists for many Western stories it's an easy way to feel superior we tell ourselves for a richer more civilized cleaner on this side of the Rio Grande admittedly poverty New Mexico can be more severe than poverty in the United States and more widespread but this disparity isn't used to inspire sympathy it's used to justify bigotry those folks south of the border they're just bad hombres right and this game is fully six years older than that infamous quote the game is so completely uncritical in recreating and representing these cable news prejudices that it feels like it's agreeing with them I'm of two minds about that one is that if the game didn't actually want to be racist it could have made any kind of small effort not to be the second mind though is that Techland being polish might be deliberately recreating a parallel universe where all the [ __ ] that tumbles out of Sean Hannity's mouth is true precisely because they see those stories the same way they see our older stories about the American West as a mythology that was never true but is culturally allegorical I used to have more faith that this country was moving away from jingoistic nationalism but the opposite has been true it's possible that with a little distance and removed this was more obvious to international observers of American television and pop culture the cartel says some of the most unflattering things I can think of regarding the American character but how many of those things are fully untrue once you get past the insult of having it said so plainly it is certainly tasteless to include mass shootings extrajudicial violence and police brutality towards women and minorities with such casual frivolous representations of the acts but I can't say that I don't recognize these things as specifically American problems and specifically American attitudes addressed back in August Arizona sheriff joe arpaio received a presidential pardon for a conviction of criminal contempt he earned by refusing to put an end to just the kind of extrajudicial race-based policing that these characters are so disgusting for representing Kalla for as the cartel is bigoted spiteful morally bankrupt and intensely hypocritical my deepest discomfort with it is not that I find it excessive in its representation of American attitudes it's that I find it more familiar now than I ever would have been mm all of them the idea that the stories of the American West are a little bit of truth and a whole lot of [ __ ] is actually the whole foundation of the next and final game of the series Call of Juarez gunslinger this last game is shorter lower budget and features a new cel-shaded art style that stands in contrast to previous titles ambitions toward high-fidelity graphics it's also the most mechanically satisfying and totally consistent out of all of them it's almost like the cartels over falling failure and rejection by critics and audiences both freed Techland to be as playful as they were with the genre in the very first game to assume that they simply had to scrap the entire reputation of the Call of Juarez series and come up with something that will stand out as a distinct and fresh title with last game was sour and angry from start to finish breezy fun and arcade style trick shooting are the major drivers of tone and structure this time around it is in a way an apology for the last game by virtue of its almost inverse construction it's the first game in the series to actually add a method of presentation to the western genre and not just adapt what was already done in movies television and books here's the frame Silas Greaves is a bounty hunter out of the Old West and when he rolls into Abilene Kansas in 1910 his time has pretty well passed a passing car startles his horse and nearly bucks the old man off of it he sits down at the bar with a collection of bored day drinkers young and old Silas Reeves has one of the most relatable goals of any protagonist we've talked about today he doesn't want to pay for his drinks he knows a magical phrase that'll make this happen I used to run with Billy the Kid everyone's damn curious about that and Silas himself is the subject of a dime novel or two of which one of the young bar patrons is a fan young Dwight buys him a beer and the game begins you see everything you play through in gunslinger is the mind's eye image of Silas's narration he play through his tangents you play through his lies you play his very occasional truths it's deeply clever with how it takes the players understanding of being in an already fictional artificial environment and then crediting all of that artificiality to an untrustworthy narrator who deliberately distorts and exaggerated civ ents and places described not only that but the kind of difference in scale between movie western violence and video game Western violence is explained away and internally sensible in a movie Western sometimes the whole two hours leads up to just one death with the understanding that were meant to feel the weight of these deaths in full when a whole human life comes to a sudden and violent end that's a big deal but in the course of a first-person shooter really any first-person shooter you're talking about killing hundreds if not thousands of creatures and people in robots because the violence has by contrast little to no wait violence and a shooter is no big deal unless the game deliberately tries to add phonetic heft because it is experientially still a game there is no tragedy when someone is shot in a round of paintball and it's the same deal here it's why the cartel was so awful in its callous frivolity because it's violence all had roots in serious weighty themes that were drugged down and rend meaningless by the essential artificiality of the shooting if you reload a safe file or restart the game all these people are exactly as they were before until you shoot them again and if they had any actual humanity to them that might be tragic which is another one of HBO's Westworld central points but they're just figments pixels and sound clips and behavior driven by scripted equations they are no more human than a daydream Calliphora is gun slain contextualizes it's impossible genocide 'el excess is exactly as evaporative a consequence as it really is just an old man's bragging just stories mostly gunslingers mechanical focus is more deliberately artificial than the previous games in an art katy way that lends a lot of strength to the tall tale perspective like previous Call of Juarez games there's a slow-motion bullet time mode but the intent here is a little different gun slinger the more men you killed in a row in a greater variety of ways the higher your combo goes the quicker your slow motion gets restored and the quicker you earn personal upgrades for Silas you even get an ability you can use roughly once a minute where you can dodge a bullet that would have been fatal to you by leaning to the left or right if you leave the wrong way you still die but it's an intensely dramatic flourish and a very satisfying little mechanic of player forgiveness all this action this ridiculous and colourful violence is way higher on spectacle and drama than realism or difficulty Silas couldn't have died after all he's right here telling you the whole yarn he's both a proud man and a sly man so he's obviously gonna give you a version that both keeps your attention and makes him look good a great example is a late-game level where Silas is fighting his way through a town that's been drowned in a swamp one of the barflies Steve starts nodding off in the present tense dialogue that plays over the action Silas says suddenly I was surrounded by Indians on all sides and it makes no sense at all but there they are and the player fights a half dozen of them the listeners get confused and ask if there was really such an ambush and Silas says nah I just wanted to see if Steve was paying attention there so the tangent is over the enemies disappear and the regular story resumes in the very first level young Dwight takes over telling the story because he read about Silas and a cheap novel and in that novel Silas gets into a duel with a legendary lawman Pat Garrett so that's what the player does when you the player are done winning the duel Silas interjects that all he said that he met Pat Garrett and literally rewinds the player too before they entered the barn and this time there's no duel this is the particular brilliance of the games frame the player is a participant but they are only an imaginative participant they are themselves seated at the bar same as everyone else and they're completely at the mercy of whatever voice is doing the storytelling what's true what isn't that doesn't matter because all this boils down to doing what the players doing trying to find a little entertainment on a slow in dusty afternoon if you have a beer every time Silas does the vibe comes through even stronger Calliphora is gunslinger is not trying to simulate a version of the West where men are legends and live by the gun it's simulating the experience of the West where it's a hundred degrees out by eleven o'clock in the morning and you ain't got [ __ ] to do so you sit around and you drink and you talk about a version of the West where men are legends and live by the guns this kind of wild mishmash of visual mechanical and oral storytelling is something quite literally only possible in an interactive medium like videogames it took three games trying to tell a Western like Hollywood might before tech Lin landed on how to tell a Western like Hollywood can't and I wonder if they would have gotten there at all if the cartel hadn't been so justifiably hated business and branding usually make it so that subsequent games and a franchise are locked into a process of escalation taking what came before and making it bigger better more gunslinger is smaller weirder less because of this it's more memorable and delightful than it would have or could have been if it had aimed to escalate from bound in blood and the cartel the game's art style being shifted to a more colorful less grounded direction is another wise choice found in bloods environments and particularly at skyboxes were already pushing further towards imaginative mythology than the actual western landscape and the cartel didn't seem much to care about its art style besides maintaining its self-serious tone it was intended to be broadly realistic but was ultimately too cheap in its production to hit the mark gunslinger is a rejection of that ambition towards realism and acknowledgment that as a be title it needed some way to do more with less so use cell shading and vibrant and possible color to do the job instead and ended up doing that job much better it's also a bit of a business decision gunslinger feels confident but it's not actually doing anything visually or tonally that Borderlands didn't already do and Borderlands was already aiming for a space Western violet cowboy bebop it also paired a kind of pseudo comic-book look with willfully shamelessly artificial shooting mechanics and a high level of player feedback John damage and arcade combos gunslinger isn't as heavy-handed with either the art style or the mechanical feedback as Borderlands but Techland is obviously banking on a kind of broad familiarity with comfort with the aesthetic it's a risk but not ultimately much of one in considering Borderlands success and popularity I might not have even brought it up except gunslinger exactly replicates a Borderlands flourish where they introduced boss fights with comic book panels without that maybe the inspiration is just inspiration but as it is Techland tip their hand about this being as much a marketability thing as an artistic choice yet the whole thing does feel much more specific to Call of Juarez than Borderlands with legacy versions of the most rewarding systems and flourishes for in previous Call of Juarez games duels are back for example with a slightly more organized version of how it was inbound in blood the organization isn't necessary though and it's one instance where I found the more arcadey approach slightly detrimental back inbound in blood winning a quick-draw duel was a two-step process where you had to pace around your opponent enough to keep the camera in focus with the keyboard and an edge your hand close to your pistol without actually touching it using the mouse there was a little awkward sure but the music and the way the camera fades from clarity to fog if you fall out of step the gun belt perspective it was intensely evocative of the emotions of a cinematic quick quick draw even if it was mechanically finicky gunslinger reverses the controls and keyboard to edge your hands towards the gun on the mouse and keep focused on the opponent it feels much less satisfying that way somehow more artificial keeping your hand in the right position and keeping focused on your opponent raises speed and accuracy percentages and if your percentages are higher at the end of the pacing around a period you draw first even if you don't draw first you can lean and avoid shots during quick draws like back in the first column Juarez the problem with this is that it focuses the player on the numbers and not the drama of the moment it's obviously a kind of mini game which is how it was in the first column Juarez bounden blood had what was still obviously a mini game but by removing the feedback and reducing it to two men and guns it had a winning thematic clarity it felt like a moment a scene not a bonus round of the game gunslingers best moments come from embracing artificiality but it's not a universal design solution a Western has to have an organic natural feel in there somewhere Silas himself feels natural particularly in his winking egotism he's a great anchor with the whole piece and is a better salesman for the radical individualism of the Western gunslinger archetype than Ray ever was Ray was all about taking all about stepping on the backs of others to glorify the self silas itself is as much a mythological construction as the West itself and his self-centeredness has consequences that are more human than monstrous he talks more than he takes like what happens when Silas excuses himself from the storytelling to take a piss he is spending a yarn about dueling Jesse James on a moving train and no one's really buying it the player moves from train car to train car but when Silas gets up from the table the Train is surrounded in fog the barflies discuss among themselves whether Silas is pulling their legs entirely if he's even the man he says he is in the first place and if maybe they ought to just stop buying him drinks and encouraging all this foolishness meanwhile the player moves through the same train car over and over no one is telling the story so the player is stuck in limbo and tell Silas it gets back and resumes when Silas does get back the colour seeps back here and the bullets start flying again Silas tells just one story that the player doesn't participate in the story of what sent him down his path to becoming a bounty hunter once long ago three men in Silas along with his two brothers got to drinking and playing cards Silas won big the next day those three men caught up with him and hung Silas and his brothers by the neck a branch snapped before Silas had fully suffocated but not his brothers the game's plot Silas catches up with and kills two of those three men as the player but the third always eluded him now throughout the game the player can connect secrets during the level called nuggets of truth which unlock little virtual index cards with actual historical truths of the places and people featured in the game for Silas this non interactive story is his nugget of truth three men really did kill his brothers and drive him to a life of violence and the last of those three is tending bar here in 1910 Abilene gunslinger has the tightest climax of any of the four games and even though it shares no characters and new environments with previous kala forest titles it provides a kind of closure on the themes of each and every Call of Juarez game early in the game Silas recounts the time that he encountered chief gray wolf who is notable for being one of the few queries that silence Silas doesn't actually claim to defeat gray wolf gave him a prophecy instead Silas sees in his mind's eye a forest glade where he's attacked by man after man emerging like ghosts from the trees ray wolf says you will come to this place again and kill many more men and the darkness will grow until it consumes everything that you are the soul would have no rainbow if the I had no tears both the player and Silas do return to the glade with Silas and drifting off in a song or reverie and breaking with a story being told to say hey did I ever tell you about the time I met grey wolf at which point the bar flies all grown and exasperatedly shout for God's sake yes and the game's climax Silas isn't in graveyard that closely resembles the death glade he fights the ghosts of everyone he's killed the bar flies comment that Silas has obviously had too much to drink and the afternoon must be over this is when Silas reveals himself he is who he says he is and he has come to Abilene to finish the work Silas had two points to his storytelling one was straightforward he truly does enjoy talking about himself and drinking for free and you get the impression that Silas often spends time this way his stories are too worn in to be anything different but his lies particularly have a point he was daring Bob the third man who killed his brothers to correct him and correct him Bob did in two crucial instances where he revealed how much he knew by trying to feel superior to the old man this can play out two ways in the game one is that Silas can give old Bob a gun and demand that he participate in one final duel it is the only duel in the game with no arcade feedback for speed or accuracy it is the only duel not contextualized as fictional Silas guns the man down and everyone is pretty horrified in 1910 you can't really just shoot a man dead in the middle of the bar and expect to get away with it no one is prepared for the reality of the to be in the room with a braggart is comfortable to be in the room with an armed murderer is not but you don't have to choose that way when the cartel gave me a climactic choice to kill my teammates or let the suspect live I killed my teammates because the characters hated each other I hated the characters and I did not believe for one moment that any of these people would ever do the right thing if their lives depended on it which I suppose it did Ben McCall went to prison and the u.s. went to war with Mexico all of that suffering and all of that cruelty just led to larger cruelty is a systemic whirlwind that blows away any good intentions out to sea it was the right end for that story bleak and pointless and mean gunslinger offers the same choice between revenge and redemption but the storytelling all points in the direction of redemption if Silas murders Bob in that dirty barroom then Silas has become fully the person that Bob made him violence was done to Silas and Silas did violence to others on and on and on down climb in oberus of cruelty without end ray wolf told him that he was deep in the cycle that he'd never break it without feeling regret without choosing to put his guns down for good Silas fights his ghosts at the end of the game not because he's gotten too drunk but because he's finally gotten to the point of all his stories to his own personal climax as a man and he gets caught up in the moment all that killing me for what because he got paid for it for revenge Silas is man whose life is lived in that death Glade where living is a new enemy emerging from the trees every moment more than you can count more than you can kill a moment of conflict that stretches and repeats on and on until death comes for Silas at last but it doesn't have to go down that way he found Bob he found his man his quarry just as surely as ray found ability at the end Silas and Bob have a showdown but it doesn't have to be a violent one Bob breaks down he apologizes his regret is real his sorrow is real they've both done bad things they're both evil men but like Fletcher said to Josey Wales the war is over we all lost something but the time isn't done to build something else instead gunslingers final twists is that young Dwight the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed DOM fanboy is Dwight Eisenhower on his way to West Point if Silas kills Bob Healey Dwight leaves the bar shaken and disillusioned his heroes were monsters after all but if Silas shows Bob forgiveness Dwight is inspired stories are one thing actions are another the wildness of the Wild West the vacuum of wilderness the lawlessness of its people the tallness of its tales these legends mean something in the telling but they mean more as myths than truths the implication is that Dwight goes on to be a shaper of modern America we are built on these stories of selfishness and exploitation and these historical truths of selfishness and exploitation as well but we can take what we find in no bullying and rise above them if you love westerns and for all my criticism I hope it's clear that I do love them pretty dearly you know that the mark of a true Western hero is a willingness to stand up be counted and do the right thing you can't rely on anyone else kindness and courage is always a choice and rarely the easier popular choice the cartel was as artistically insulting as it was because it assumes that we will never be better than entitled killers and thieves like ray M Thomas that the cycles of exploitation that do historically define the Old West will never dissipate or heal but it isn't necessarily true the Western tells us there is always another choice even if you stand alone on the street when the clock strikes noon thanks for watching I want to take a moment to thank my name all the people who are currently supporting me through the crowdfunding website patreon I really appreciate all the donations and I want to thank by name the people who are doing $10 month or more people like Ashley rain Josh Farkas Morton scanning NK jemisin hey Sean David Carlson Spiro Sedaris Christian Brian Pullman doing Josh magic flyer gallic matthew mason brandon boat dirk corporal andrew steele nobody a o'neal luke fowler abdul rahman al aBSI alexander Sundin colin scott or calling shot I'm sorry Nate Williamson Connor MacLeod cybot be Daniel piney Tom Vickers Tom Howard Inc Aurelien Cameron Jackson rhinock Darien DISA tell Las Olas called Lisa Tyler Dow Z Eric Jepsen Martin Carsten Michael Coonan - ian huen Chris larkey artem cirno David harps team Matthew Cassidy Brett llamo Daniel Oren Chris Johnson rich store free morphine Daniel Martin is on bark booty Lucas cocoa sorcerer Dave Argos Swift Nathan Janssen Adrian come away Mark Phillips Liang Zhou Michael's soon in Badr Clayton and Ray Videla Andrew tap Tim Marsh radio vacboys my couch alone kesselmann bradley smith gumdrops Nathaniel garish Rob Tackett Daniel Nora Marie : Alex B McHale our stove scorpion strike green dude Tyler roof Simon nur Falk Darden playas acne Edward small sudana 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Oscar Spangenberg Tom painter which Luke Murphy Alexander Crohn's bill Dobbins Daniel Pennypacker Dennis Clark Eli Bergman's Julius Dean Morgan mall Alexander leister Igor Babiak coumarin Vijayan Brian Hill Jared mayor Andrews Larson Kevin chef Anthony Bardell Rowan King Peter Dane Dane astute care Lars Ingvar Anderson Jack Zack corpse teen Daniel Marsh Matthew Sutton Aaron Alba Jesse Wilkinson Alexander a foo do Cassie Ranjha Bay Rob Tackett comfy hat tongue Gabriel Nicolas Christian Zechariah Anson Eddie Burton saw up she will Milky Way resident Carol Henderson Nicole Hamilton Jack Dawson seee Keane matt morgan cost sims ii i diesel sadhana Joshua Thomas Vicky macmaine told heart Dan pop Garrett leafy matheus direct Ryan Wilder Anthony Barlow and Samuel procopio Xavier happy trails to all of you and thank you very much

Channel: Noah Caldwell-Gervais

Views: 285,710

Keywords: Call of Juarez, Gunslinger, Bound in Blood, The Cartel, Critique, Review, Retrospective

Id: P_nGPdZ5-PQ

Length: 90min 13sec (5413 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 31 2017